Your Phone as Life’s Platform, & Will the FTC or the FCC fix the IoT?

The most important thing you need to know right now about the Internet of Things (IoT) is that when you choose your phone, you are choosing a platform, an ecosystem, eventually what the first phenomenologist Edmund Husserl called a Lebenswelt — lifeworld — that moves ceaselessly toward connecting everything and everyone in your life and many outside of your life to you.

(By the way, “1:1 experiences” includes both du and es —Thou and it — in Martin Buber’s terms; in the IoT, people are devices that create content and communicate in unusual ways, unusual because by 2020, fewer than 1/5 of the devices connected to the internet will be people.)

One surprising implication of where the personal IoT is going is that ONE AND ONLY ONE type of a document that nobody reads — the deservedly-maligned privacy policy — could become much more deserving of your attention than, e.g., your will, your employment agreement or your prenuptial agreement: the one and only privacy policy of the phone or other platform provider that defines you in relation to your lifeworld. Because that platform provider will be accountable — through smarter regulation than we have now, implemented through standards like some of the platform requirements emerging now — to pass those obligations down through all of the developers in its ecosystem.

We had better have enough control over the IoT through platforms, and we had better have enough control over our phones not to have to engage in extreme information governance like this fictitious young woman:

Remember, Kids, never swallow your phone, nor let it swallow you!

By 2020, fewer than 1/5 of the devices connected to the internet will be people.